EDES — Efficient dynamic selective encryption framework to secure multimedia traffic in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we propose a new framework able to ensure security, multimedia quality and energy efficiency in Multimedia Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs). The energy is an important and limited resource, which has a direct impact on the lifetime of nodes in MWSNs. In addition, the characteristics of MWSNs like the limited bandwidth and non-deterministic channel access have a significant impact on the QoS of multimedia traffic. We propose the Efficient Dynamic Selective Encryption Framework (EDES) in order to reduce the energy consumption and increase the QoS while ensuring a secure multimedia traffic. EDES proposes three security levels (high, medium and low) and the selection of each level depends on the energy and QoS parameters. Moreover, the cross-layer approach is selected for EDES to take into account the different parameters at physical, MAC and upper layers. The capacity metric is proposed to evaluate the possibility to increase or decrease the security level. The simulation results illustrate the importance of the security level adaptation according to the QoS and the energy parameters. EDES increases the lifetime duration of nodes by almost 40% compared to static encryption.